Dragonhaven (18 page)

 

The grown-ups were really preoccupied at dinner that night, so they didn't notice I was really preoccupied too. Kit and Jane were there as well as Dad, and Grace and Billy. I don't know if having more silent grown-ups there was supposed to make the silence less obvious but it didn't. Grace and Lois and I kept the conversation going. Grace did a pretty good burble too, although she always did it the way you make “mmm-hmmm” noises at a four-year-old (human) who wants to tell you a story. It reminded me of being four, when Grace sometimes baby-sat for me. This didn't actually improve my mood. It seemed to me they were still “mmm-hmmming” me really.

I wanted to ask them how the meeting had gone, but I couldn't, since I wasn't supposed to know about it. It did make me a little angry that they seemed to think Martha and Eleanor wouldn't have noticed, even if they thought they had me safely tucked away (they were right about that, which was part of why I was angry), but I've noticed before the way children are conveniently assumed to be dumb when adults need them to be. You'd think the adults would learn. But who am I to be sarcastic? I didn't want to know about the poacher. The villain. I didn't want the poacher ever to cross my mind for any reason whatsoever. It was bad enough thinking about Lois' mom, every day, which I did, as I told you. I used to try to blot out the memory part of it by deliberately calling up that dragon cave I still dreamed about sometimes, which usually had her in it, because there she was
alive
which is how I knew it was only a stupid childish dream and it meant I really was a wuss.

I mostly could blot the poacher out. But this was the worst yet: that he had parents who could make big trouble for Smokehill. How do I explain this to you though? I did think about it, that evening, with all these preoccupied grown-ups eating Grace's food and pretending really badly that everything was normal, whatever normal was any more. I thought about it and kind of realized—although writing it down like this makes it again a whole lot more rational than it was at the time—that I
couldn't
think about it. It was too much. If there was a line, this was over it. My job was to raise Lois. Somebody else was going to have to deal with the villain.

 

About the time Lois started riding on my shoulders she also suddenly hey presto housebroke herself. What a major relief
that
was. Dragon diapers are the WORST. (And I should say I didn't do all my own laundry, if you counted Lois. We all did Lois' diapers. And—speaking of needing generators to run stuff—I
can't imagine
doing baby dragon diapers without a washing machine. Or anyway
I don't want to
. Mind you we were probably destroying the local groundwater table or whatever. They took more than one go and you didn't just throw them in without some preliminary detox either.)

But it was weird, how fast it happened, and how little I had to do with it. It makes sense if you figure that this must be the stage when the baby dragon is not merely old enough (and scaly enough) to look out of its mom's pouch but old enough to climb out and do its business outdoors, which must be a major relief to
Mom.
I had noticed that Lois' scales first started really looking like scales on her head, like they grew there first so she could look out and get used to the
idea
of out.

It was a relief in other ways too—her tail was turning into a tail, and the diapers didn't fit so well any more, and even Billy's ingenuity has its limits. Big disgusting yuck. I used to make jokes about Super Glue. Especially when—No, never mind.

The point is that suddenly it wasn't a problem any more. Except that it was because everything about Lois was a problem and the problem got bigger as she got bigger, and while no more dragon diapers was TOTALLY a good thing, dragon dung doesn't disintegrate
that
fast, so I had to get out there and bury the stuff all the time, and dragonlet digestion really puts the stuff through, so while I would have said she was never out of my sight when we were outdoors together (she'd better not be) she still managed to leave piles I didn't notice her leaving.

Then there was the fact that dragonlet pee slowly burns holes in almost everything it touches (it didn't burn right through the diapers, but it wore through fast enough that we had to patch them, and needlework is
not
my thing but Grace let me use pretty much anything in her sewing box, so some of them got kind of artistically interesting over time and repeat mending) and fortunately Billy and Grace's house didn't have any lawn to destroy, but she still almost managed to kill one of Grace's Smokehill-winter-proof, tougher-than-the-French-Foreign-Legion rhododendrons before I figured out how to persuade her—Lois, not Grace—to pee and crap in one sort of general area. Although this still wasn't foolproof. I swear I was
always
out there with my shovel—to the extent that if a dragon could get neurotic I should have given Lois a complex—and even so half the time when Kit or Jane came round the conversation would begin like this:

Kit or Jane: “Hi, Jake. There's a—”

Me: “Okay.” And I go get my shovel. (If it was Whiteoak, he just
looked
at me. And I'd go get my shovel.) And miss whatever they'd come to say, probably, which may have been the idea.

Lois would always come with me. Far from developing a complex she was delighted for an excuse to go outside and play some more, and as far as she was concerned (evidently) my strange compulsion to bury her leavings was as good an excuse as anything else,
and
the house was getting smaller and smaller as she got bigger and bigger. (I wonder what she thought about the toilet. I always used to wonder that about Snark. I don't know how good a dragon's sense of smell is, but it would have to be really bad not to draw the correct conclusions about what the toilet is about. And a dog has to know. So isn't it thinking, Hey, why do you get to use that thing when I have to go outdoors even when the wind chill makes it sixty below and the snow is coming in
sideways
?)

She weighed about thirty pounds when she housebroke herself, but that's still a pretty fair weight to carry around on your shoulders (if you're only a human), especially when it wiggles. The thing I worried about the most—the most after the possibility of someone taking a wrong turn and wandering into Billy and Grace's back yard some day, especially some day when I hadn't got out there with my shovel, or maybe in fact I
was
out there with my shovel,
and
with Lois herself—was that she was going to start practicing her fire-throwing. The fact that she was alive proved her
igniventator
was working, and the skin on my stomach sure believed it. And as well as getting bigger and noisier she was getting livelier and she wanted more action. How do you teach a dragon to come, sit and stay? Fortunately she still had little short legs and couldn't run as fast as I could. (Snark had been able to run faster than me by the time he was twelve weeks old, although I was still pretty little myself then.) But I was pretty sure this wouldn't be true much longer. I was also keeping a sharp, anxious eye on her wing stubs, but they didn't seem to be doing anything much yet either.

But speaking of training a dragon, it was at this stage, when she was beginning to spend significant amounts of time outside her mom's pouch equivalent that I began to realize…this is going to sound really stupid…that she was trying to, uh, respond to me, I mean aside from the fact that she still got hysterical if I wasn't around for more than about two hours.

I've raised, or helped raise, baby birds and baby raccoons and baby woodchucks and baby porcupines, and watched the Rangers raise baby bears and baby wolves and baby eagles, and some of them even survived to grow up and fly or run or trundle away. But when a baby robin gets all excited and sticks its neck out and opens its mouth and goes “ak kak kak kak kak” at you it's not exactly responding to
you
. It's responding to the prospect of getting fed. It never thinks about being a robin, and it doesn't care what you are, so long as you're feeding it the right stuff. (Chopped up earthworms rolled in dirt are a favorite. Delicious.) I also know that animals raised by humans tend to grow up funny because they aren't getting socialized by their own kind and don't learn how to do it, but even then I'm not sure that what they're doing is confusing themselves by trying to be human. What they're doing is failing to learn how to be themselves.

And I
was
a little silly about Lois…okay, more than a little. But can you blame me? The point is, when she started spending more time at a little distance, so we could like look at each other—that was another thing, her eyes had suddenly gone all sharp and focused at about five months; I'd begun to think that maybe dragons don't use sight much (and then I'd remember her mom's eye, sharp and clear and focused as anything—and dying—and then I'd remember all the impossible stuff I'd seen in that eye about hope and despair—and then I'd
take
my mind off it like peeling Snark as a puppy off the shoe he was disemboweling)—anyway, when Lois could watch me properly, she started trying to do what I was doing. For a while I could ignore it, put it down to why your cat walks on your keyboard when you're trying to use your computer, why your dog suddenly wants to play fetch when it's your turn to get dinner.

But she wasn't just trying to get my attention. It took me a while to figure this out—dragons and humans are shaped so much different. It's not like baby chimps learning to crack coconuts with stones by picking up a stone and banging with it because that's what Mom's doing. Or maybe it is. When I was typing, if she didn't want a nap, Lois used to dance. I should maybe say I'm kind of a dramatic typist. I had had to practice keeping my legs and feet still when Lois first got out of the sling, so she could lie on them while I typed. If they weren't held down, my feet started tapping all by themselves. (Which wasn't actually such a bad thing, because if she didn't want a nap—and she way too often didn't want a nap—she'd dance with my feet. This was a little distracting I admit, but I usually managed to keep typing.) She made great wheezy inhale noises when I was breathing in something especially wonderful that Grace was taking out of the oven, but that may just have been that she agreed with me. When I'd scratch my head or pull my hair and grunt while I was doing schoolwork I didn't like (which tended to make the Headache worse too) she'd scratch and shake
her
head—and grunt.

Sometimes it was more complicated than that—or maybe what I mean is it was harder to decide it didn't mean anything. But when I was doing laundry she began to collect whatever small loose stuff she could around the house, shoes, magazines, dropped pencils, wet rain stuff hanging over the radiators, and including snaffling towels off the rails (which in theory were hung too high for her to reach), snurgle them around a while on the kitchen floor (I tried to rescue the towels in time), leave them while the washer ran, and then bring them outdoors and spread them out on the ground (sometimes this was kind of hard on the magazines) when I hung the stuff up to dry.

This really did catch my attention because it seemed to me to say something about
her
attention span and her, you know, mental processes generally. It was way too complicated, you know? In fact it started making me think scary Dragons Are Intelligent thoughts so I concentrated on trying to prevent her from “washing” anything that would make more work for
me
. I told myself that baby critters are always getting into other things—especially things you don't want them to get into—it's what they
do
. It's part of being a baby critter. It's part of growing up. Half-grown raccoons are
incredibly
creative escape artists and
nosy
and
boy
can they get into trouble. It's hardwired. Nothing to get paranoid about. Nope. Nothing at all.

And I've said she was noisy. Well, I talked to
her
a lot. That went back to that very first day, that awful day when I found her, when we were like both yattering from our different traumas. Well, same trauma, different angle. It's like we'd just never stopped, it's just the frenzy level had dropped some, and most of our yattering now was pretty cheerful. A little overwrought sometimes maybe but pretty cheerful.

I've told you she had learned really quickly to “talk” during pauses in a conversation—the one time she consistently broke this rule was while I was in the shower. (She'd gone on not liking to get wet.) I always left the bathroom door half open so she could follow me in if she wanted to (which she always did, but I kept hoping…) and she talked to/with the
shower
. I could hear her—the water going
whoosh whoosh whoosh
and Lois going kind of
woooosh
whooch
waaaaaaaash wiii
iiIIIIiiii
sh
, as if she assumed the shower was either one of my noises or a major monologist, and didn't quite understand why it only made this one sort of splash-and-splatter-punctuated roaring cry.